Drum roll please ....... after weeks of work - it's ready.

The Unbelievably Complicated Figure Shader for Apollo Maximus is finished. The shader system uses the standard textures that come with AM. All of the new features are done with procedural shaders. There are over 120 nodes in the face shader, and dozens more on the other zones.

Over 40 figure dials let you adjust the shaders from the pose room. No need to navigate the shader tree in the material room.

Also, I've published a new version of parmatic. You need that to make this shader system do the shader parameters on the figure. I've also published my light set.

With this shader system you can get hundreds of distinct looks from this one set of textures. It comes with many presets to help get you started.

Click here for the AMUCFS Shader thread at RDNA

Click here for the Parmatic 2 thread at RDNA

Click here for my light thread at RDNA

There is not yet an explanation of all the parameters. I'll be writing a tutorial that shows what each parameter does with renders demonstrating the effects. Keep an eye out for that.

Meanwhile, you can ask questions here or at the Node Cult.

I've sprinkled quite a few renders with this shader during its development here in this forum and also at the Node Cult at RDNA over the past few weeks. If you missed them, have a look around. There are a few in my gallery as well.

Let me see YOUR renders!

Looks great. :)

Looking forward to more renders. I'm sure people will soon start begging for AMUCFSV4. :)

You mean V4UCFS - already did it. Also, V3. But that's a secret. 

The problem with those ones is, which texture set do I build it for. So I have another idea. This will be a doozy. 

Well, we'll just wait a minute on other UCFS and see how this one holds up to scrutiny. I have a habit of making things that seem easy to me, but others don't get my results. So maybe its a waste of time.

I REALLY tried to make this one easy. I give you presets for the parameters and my actual lights.

Thank you Bagginsbill, this is really a treat. I'm looking forward to working with it.

Very impressive!!

Now that's really amazing! really... really-really...  okay, I'm speechless. :blink:

Great job, BB.. I grabb AM, but unfortunately really don't have a use for him.

Now a Girl or Aiko 3 version I'd love... or heck even a power pixie! hehee

Now that you have yer system down though, I'd imagine it would be easy to adapt to other figures.

This is amazing !
Thanks !!

Garee, you're not thinking out of the box. AM can be mophed into a quite attractive woman, at least the head can.

But yes, the system can be adapted to other figures. The problem is they don't have a standard texture the everybody has. The beauty of AM was he COMES with textures that work great in a procedural shader. Anton did the colors right and there is only minimal painted-on highlights. (A bit on the chin - keeps ruining my closeups)

I've been looking forward to these since day 1...which incredibly wasn't all that long ago (you work fast!).

I haven't attempted to use/install Parmatic before, but I doubt I'll have any problems (there's a readme after all).

I have a render going right now that I'm half inclined to stop just so I can use this shader! Maybe I'll do a with and without for comparison. :)

Thanks again BB. You are the MASTER!

the shader works fine. but there is only on the face texture.

what could be wrong?

Please type more carefully I don't understand.

There is only WHAT on the face texture?

Are you looking for the black skin? Set the very first dial - Skin 2 Blend - 0 = white, 1 = black.

Are you looking to change the face texture? Look in the Faces folder. If you don't have a faces folder you didn't unzip it correctly.

See? I'm guessing at problems and I have a hundred more I'm guessing. Please be more clear. Screenshots help instead of just words.

This is great stuff!!!
I just downloaded and am going to test it on AM. Am currently working on a character, so this comes at exactly the right time.
Thank you very much!!

Quote - Please type more carefully I don't understand.

There is only WHAT on the face texture?

Are you looking for the black skin? Set the very first dial - Skin 2 Blend - 0 = white, 1 = black.

Are you looking to change the face texture? Look in the Faces folder. If you don't have a faces folder you didn't unzip it correctly.

See? I'm guessing at problems and I have a hundred more I'm guessing. Please be more clear. Screenshots help instead of just words.

i load the default shader. when i render there is no texture on the body. only on the face.

what could be wrong? its 100% my mistake. but i dont know what.

Again, your description is not specific enough. When you say there is no texture on the body, I'm not sure which of the following you actually mean:

1. The shader is not attached at all - it is showing the default AM pink plastic.
2. The shader is operating, but the colors from the texture file are not there.
3. The shader is not operating at all, and the body is solid white

I need a picture of the render. Also, go into the material room and verify that you have a really huge collection of shader nodes attached to the SkinBody material zone.

I can't even really begin to guess because you haven't let ME see your render and your material. Your description of the problem seems impossible to me. The pz2 file that contains the face shader ALSO contains the body shader, and I cannot imagine any possible way that it could attach one without the other.

If however, you do mean that only the body TEXTURE file isn't there, but that the procedural elements are working, such as body freckles and veins, then perhaps you did not install the Apollo Maximus textures correctly, or you deleted them?

It would really save a lot of time if you would post an image of your rendered figure, next to the material room, where I can see the root node and the material room preview and at least the first few nodes in the shader tree of the body material zone.

bagginsbill - thank you.  Lots to play around with and experiment. 

As an "academic" exercise, I want to try getting a more blondie type of texture for my Apollo Maximus (I am not hung-up on blonde men, sorry to disappoint, but just that my fan-art character is a blonde guy.)

Thanks so much - looking forward to trying this out!

-Alisa

Thanks BB, works well under Vista / Poser 7

i open poser. than i run paramatic main.
then i open apollo. then i go into the runtime folder and apply NoRT. then i use the default shader.

at the end i render.

ok works now.

ice-boy:

You don't need to run parmatic yourself. The shader takes care of running it for you.

That render shows the opposite of what you said. The body HAS the texture, the face does not.

Which gives me a clue what you did. You may have done this without thinking. When you click on Face loaders, there's no guarantee you have the face texture for Diesel or Willis. Those are additional downloads and do not come with AM. I think you don't have those, and you selected one of those faces.

If you truly just loaded the default shader that could not have happened.

But now you say its working? Ok.

Infinity10,

Load one of the faces that has no eyebrows - I think it is Face01 but I'm not sure.

Anyway, get the face without the painted on eyebrows.

Now go into the shader parameters for Brows and Lashes. Turn on the Brows transmap - set it to 1. This will use the eye brow transmap overlay.

Now adjust the Brow Stain:Value and the Lash Stain:Value. (I may not be remembering those parameter names exactly) Try .5 to start. This will lighten the brows and lashes. Even blondes have pretty dark eye brows, but you can go all the way to WHITE, if you set the stain saturation to 0 and the stain value to 1.

To get more yellowish stain color, move the hue closer to 1. To get more reddish, move the hue closer to 0. Remember though to get other than shades of gray you need a non-zero saturation.

I think (it's all a blur now) I did a little of this on the Scandinavian or the Irish preset - can't remember which. I remember one of them does not have black eyelashes, but light brown instead.

you know when it asks you for body-hair? i was not doing what i was supposed to do hehehe :)

the shader is perfection.

More pictures, more pictures!

Come on, show me your creativity. Apollo Maximus is the most amazingly morphable dude I've seen. So many faces. Now you can make textures to match. Share your presets. Even test renders are interesting. You don't have to make a whole scene.

How about a Genghis Khan dude - try the Body Builder preset.

More Blue Men - I only worked on the glaring expression, not the morph. Their faces are really angular and interesting.

Villains,

Aliens,

Elves. (what color are Elves?)

Ogres.

Dwarves.

Hobbits.

How about Native Americans - should be easy to make a good ruddy skin tone now.

bagginsbill - many thanks.  Will experiment.

Thanks - I can't  wait to play with this :)

looks like someone's into Blue Man Group..;) off to see. Heck, anything that can supply eyelashes and brows is good enough for me..;)

Thank you. You are a genius among men.

I've tried installing parmatic 2 as mentioned in the readme, but it doesn't seem to be running.

Your abilities are only exceeded by your generosity.

Thank you so much.

I've tried installing parmatic 2 as mentioned in the readme, but it doesn't seem to be running.

Please define "doesn't seem to be running?"

If you're concerned that nothing is printing in the Python console, don't be. I turned off all the printing because it was very annoying.

The only way you can claim to know it is not running would be if you have moved shader dials, but confirmed that nothing is changing in the material room. Have you done that. Most people don't even know how to get the parameters up while in the material room.

Go into the mat room.
Select one of the skin zones so you can see the skin in the preview of the root node.
Use the Window menu to display the parameters window.
Change the "Skin 2 Blend" parameter from 0 to 1. If parmatic is running, the mat room will refresh and you'll see the black skin. If something is wrong, you won't.

One subtle thing about this is that Poser doesn't send a notification to Python that a parameter has changed UNTIL YOU MOVE THE MOUSE.

If you're not using the mouse, or at least moving it, move it.

If you're still convinced that parmatic is not running, open the parmaticUpdater.py file. Change the line that says verbose = 0 to verbose = 1. Then run the script and leave the Python window open. Then move a dial. If it says "Parmatic Callback" (or similar - it's not in front of me) then the callback is working and something else is wrong.

What version of Poser? What SR?

I'm using the latest SR version of P7.

I have no idea of how python works, but I tried what you said and it seems with the skin2blend so it would seem that it is installed ok.

Thanks :)

bagginsbill,

Thank you so much for sharing.  The amount of time you have put into this project must be astounding.  The results shown in your renders are outstanding.  Having made a few freebies now, I understand how much you want to see renders.  I am going to give it a shot.  but  my Poser knowledge is still very limited.  I hope I can get everything to work,  if I can I will post, if I can't , I still thank you so much.

HorseFeathers

I have everything working with P7 SR2.  What screwed me up at first was not interpreting the read-me correctly.  I battered my head against the monitor until I realised that...
a) The base texture is actually located ABOVE the other installed folders( Faces, Presets-Realistic, and Presets-Special  Effects ) in Apollo_UCFS.
b) Once I found them I needed to apply one of them before I could do anaything else.

DOH!

When I first downloaded Apollo all I ever used was Anton's MyFavRaytrace light set...until I discovered P7's 'faux' HDR. Hence their inclusion in the comparison. And I couldn't ignore BB's own included light set, which is an absolute plum I might add.

I don't know if this is listed anyway, but a simple description of what you need to do and the order in which you need to do it would probably help lift the mystery on this fine shader.

Otherwise you'll get allot of:
"Do I run the script now?"
"Why won't the face change when I tell it to?"
"Does my butt look big in this?"
etc.

Great work BB, and a sincere thank you from me.

1st ApolloRender using the newest mmpm shaders.

Cheers
DR

Not sure what's wrong, but this is what I see.

Where are the dials?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm sure it'll be something impossibly simple, but for the life of me I can't see what I've done wrong!

Looks like you forgot to install parmatic. The dials are actually created by parmatic. The dial groups are organized by the pz2 but the only way to MAKE the dials is with Python.

a simple description of what you need to do and the order in which you need to do it would probably help lift the mystery on this fine shader.

You gotta help me out with this because I wrote the readme with the shader as simple and short and to the point as I could imagine. I'm assuming you did read it. You couldn't possibly be suggesting I make it shorter, are you?

Here's the shortest possible version - should I put this at the top of the readme?

Install the shader.
Install parmatic.
Load Apollo
Double click the non-raytraced shader
render

After that its not so simple. Click faces to load them. Click presets to load them. Click better base shaders to use raytracing. Ok, it actually is that simple.

Seriously, help me out. There is no running of scripts as you mentioned. You load the shader and render. Then you play with faces and presets, and keep rendering.

Forget I mentioned it BB. It was late - I was tired...I'm a tool. The readme is exceptionally simple to follow.

With the missing dials, I now realise what I've done wrong. I keep forgetting that my main Runtime is now my Poser 7 Runtime, not Poser 6. Nothing wrong with the script...just my brain.

It's running on both machines now, and is an absolute joy! I can't wait to tinker with those dials!

Many thanks for giving this to the community bagginsbill.  Here's my first attempt at doing it justice.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1472707

The problem now is having to lift the quality bar on all of my props and clothing to match!

Quote - The problem now is having to lift the quality bar on all of my props and clothing to match!

Ain't THAT the truth! ~lol~

Would love to check these out but keep getting errors when I try to download, no matter if I try with IE or Firefox. Keeps giving me errors like too many connections and then failure to connect to server.

Yeah, I'm getting that too :(

I keep getting errors when I try to download says the database is full??

its not only bagginsbill stuff, seems that divshare is since 2 days down

I just tried downloading baggins files and it worked for me. No problems or glitches.

It's up again just got them and will be playing with them later after work. Thanks in advance they look great!